How did you start working on a project to lock away carbon dioxide in rocks?When I was working in Oman, I saw these really blue, alkaline rock pools with white deposits at the bottom. The rocks were mantle peridotite, which reacts with CO2 to form white carbonates.

Later I moved to Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, where I met Taro Takahashi and Dave Goldberg. They told me they wanted to look at a way of locking up CO2 …